I've heard about Gert a number of times. The concept takes my brain in many different directions...so there's a significant risk this post could be quite scattered.
With respect to millionaires, a saying has stuck with me for a number of years - money makes good people better and bad people worse. I think that makes a lot of sense and I've seen it go both directions. The key is to find and surround yourself with good people, regardless of how much money they have. That would be community, or in the language of the 8 forms of capital, social capital.
Language is powerful. Sometimes a tweak in how we say things can have a profound impact on our psychology. My present career path is in financial services. I cringe when I hear someone say "live below your means". I much prefer "live within your means". To me, living below comes across as less somehow. Living within is more about understanding where you are and what you have, assessing your needs (versus wants), and making a decision about where to exchange your financial capital. As I was preparing to go to university, my father gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me. "Never go into debt for something like a TV." Not much has changed in the ensuing decades since he told a teenager / young man that except for the price of TVs. Now, perhaps a TV is passe and we can substitute bigger monitor / additional monitor / new smartphone / tablet / whatever the latest gadget is. Part of why Gert is happy is her sense of "enough".
As others have noted, it takes time to get things set up to achieve full Gertitude (if you even seek to get there). That said, when it is set up, you can rely less on external inputs. If you have an
energy efficient home, generate some of the required energy yourself, grow and preserve much of the food you eat, and perhaps grow your own fibre for textiles, or make / repair your own clothes, or perhaps find deals (new or used). Keep in mind that our basic physical needs are food, clothing (at least here in the great white north), and
shelter. With assessing needs, how much square footage do you "need"? I'm sure most of us in North America could do with a lot less than we have, especially if we have less "stuff".
The ubiquitous "we" like to complain about things like taxes, inflation, energy costs, and so on. If we used less stuff and energy, we would require less income, which could allow us to pay less in tax. If we modified our lifestyle to be more resilient with respect to growing / preserving / preparing more of our own food, we could spend a lot less at grocery stores. If we worked on energy efficiency in our lives, we'd pay less to the utility companies. That way, less income could be "enough".
In Canada, the (largely ignored) legal requirement is that barter is still an exchange to be accounted for on our income taxes. Since few, if any, actually report it, I'm not sure how much that rule matters. I don't advocate breaking the law, but if we think from a perspective of abundance, if I have something in excess that you need or want, and vice versa, an exchange can be mutually beneficial. That doesn't need to be "stuff", although it can be - it could be life energy (labour), or knowledge (master/apprentice), or other areas. I think how strong communities look - at least in times past, in rural areas, when someone needed help, the community pitched in (think barn raisings or getting the fields seeded or harvested). I'm sure that still happens, but with the decline of small family farms, there are fewer people in those rural areas to pitch in and pull together for work like that. Still, I hope to be able to foster at least some of that sense of community, as much as a cantankerous curmudgeon like me can.
Being here at Permies implies we are all seeking something along the scale of Gertitude (unlikely full Ferditude). In a different (but I think related) scale, I think of the
Wheaton Eco Scale - in going through the description, elements of my life are at least at level 5, but other elements of my life are certainly lower. I'm not sure how far I'll climb the scale, but it's cool to think I may be one in a million (and many people are thankful I am one in a million...at least in some aspects that there aren't more like me).
One example that I've recently taken is drying some of our laundry on a rack rather than the
dryer. We haven't gone all the way, and She Who Must Be Obeyed's work clothes need to be a bit spiffier (funny how her nicest stuff isn't allowed to go in the dryer...hmmm), but using the sensor on the dryer, thinking that if I remove some of the heavy things like jeans and my pants and some of the towels and flannel, the dryer will run less to do a "load". Even if we reduce our dryer energy by 10%, considering that is a big energy use in the house, we
should see an impact in our overall energy use.
Now that it seems I'm rambling, I'd better stop.
We may not be there yet, but I think we are on our way to becoming
permaculture millionaires.
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